Well this is disappointing, the first 2 tracks, particularly DKWIM skips like mad. £90 and it's a wreck. Good old Amazon refunded me £22 so I could buy another copy of the album on vinyl (and keep the old one too), but this is just as bad. Saw a few Amazon reviews with people with the same problem, no idea how I contact the label to ask them what the F is going on.

Plus, I ain't got the best speakers or turntable, but it sounds like garbage. The CD sounds a million miles better. And yes, Trip Inside isn't that at all. In short, - mess.

Now pay attention to what I am going to say: The old 1997 copy becomes the "audiophile" version after this release. The new anticipated remastering is something of such irresponsibility, non-professional, laughable and made by audio ignorant folks. Did they just not remove the bass but the treble also has been cut, to the point that the album remaster sounds like an old cassette muffled tape with wimpy sound. If that 1997 release was already brick-walled and terrible, then I don't know what to call this piece of garbage.

As for the "Do you know what I mean?" (NG's 2016 Rethink) mix, this track does sound much better than the whole lot comprising of album and studio bonus tracks. If ever Noel Gallagher progressed on revisiting each track, I would have to buy this record at least 10 times and give it as a gift to my friends, just for the sake of how good that would have sounded. And I also believe this goes untold, but why are you going to spend hours, weeks and months revisiting an album that will pour millions in the pockets of disaffection figures such as Liam and left over team? I certainly would not and that's why I understand Noel's statement that he could not be bothered any longer after finishing the first track new mix.

Some of the mustique demos are very interesting, they sound very good and can be heard in detail.

Overall, a waste of money, and waste of artwork paper. Ian Cooper - the wrong guy to remaster the boxes.

In retrospect, this album is appallingly shit. And it's such shitty shit that it makes me actually like the relatively decent moments on the first two Oasis albums less than I otherwise would. I was relatively ambivalent about "Be Here Now" at the time of its release, having liked the spirit and sound (if not the featherweight substance) of those first two albums, and sort-of-digging the weirdly trudgy, grim apocalyptic beat of "D'you Know What I Mean". But this...this egotistical mess is where the truth of the matter was laid bare. Oasis always wanted to take on the mantle of The Beatles but, sadly, never understood what made The Beatles great—at all. The bits of studio silliness on "Be Here Now" (tacked-on music hall codas? Sure. Spooky backwards vocals? Yeah, why not? That's what The Beatles did, right?) are hugely cringeworthy. And Noel's lyrics are, when not utterly crap, clunky pastiches of Beatles lyrics and song titles. As though throwing out winking Beatles references out makes the resulting mess any good! That's like you or me walking down the street and yelling "Pizza! Pizza! You like that, right?!" at people and then expecting them to be full. This album is pompous, coke-fueled, insubstantial twaddle. Listening to the entire thing from start to finish is akin being allowed to thumb through Noel's own personal Beatles scrapbook and finding it has blow residue and "me like Beatles" scrawled in crayon on every page. The parts of this mess that aren't horrible are basically straight-up formulaic and see the group recycling their own sound completely, hoping/praying it'll keep working. This sound only worked—and marginally so—on those first two albums because Oasis were a group with a lot to prove. And they were young, full of verve, ready to fight and claw their way to the top! But by the third album, they were bloated rich egoists with no ideas, peddling a ploddy formula that they painted with the vibrant colors of the "Yellow Submarine" LP cover to fool everyone, including themselves. The last part is the saddest part of all of it: they fully, obviously, painfully believed their own bloviations about the level of their artistry. If you can watch the "All Around The World" video without laughing and/or puking, you're either a great liar or one of the guards at Buckingham Palace. Hell, even that second Menswear album ("¡Hay Tiempo!", which came out just barely on the heels of "Be Here Now") is a vastly superior release. Despite what Oasis' self-aggrandizing rockstar egos would have had everyone believe, the band just wasn't all that amazing. Time casts things in a very stark light. Fucking Oasis.

I give it two stars because one star would be without redeeming qualities. It's not as though the actual music here is all that bad—it's just formulaic and bloated. It's bad, but it's not Starship (2) - Knee Deep In The Hoopla bad.